nWoD X-Files

Sup /tg/. I wanna run a nWoD game where the players are FBI agents investigating paranormal shit. It's just two players, one of whom is an old hat at WoD, old and new, and the other is basically new to RPGs so it lends itself pretty well to an X-Files type game.

I'm a fairly new GM and I'm just looking for any tips and suggestions to make this enjoyable and atmospheric. Also, on the crunch side of things, how much XP should these fools start out with? I don't want them to be fresh off the bus civilians, but they shouldn't be super-cops, either. They're FBI agents, after all.

>>40499635For some background, I'm kinda doing a modern re-imagining of key elements of the Bloodborne story line, where a new cure all "vaccine" is mutating people into sub-human beasts. The "vaccine" is created by using the blood of some forgotten Lovecraftian elderbeing buried in the last remaining ruins of the Neanderthal civilization in Jackson County, Missouri where the mormons believe the garden of eden was. Because of the whole "blood vaccine" angle and it being WoD, I'm gonna throw some red herrings in to make it seem like Vampires are behind this.

>>40499635Use Hunter, either the 1e The Vigil printing, or the stop gap updates in Mortal Remains. There's already examples of government agencies doing paranormal investigation in WoD, so that can be useful for setting it up. Whether or not you want the players to have access to powers is up to you, though.

Starting characters are pretty competent at anything they choose to specialize in. Being that you and one of the players are also rather new, I wouldn't start with more than 5~10 xp if using 2e rules. Baseline characters are probably fine, too.

>>40501033I'll take that under advisement, but I really do have to stick to nWoD. Not really in a position to download or buy old books. And 5 XP was around what I was thinking, so it's good to have that confirmed. Yeah, new characters are pretty badass compared to normals anyway, but I want them to be a little extra. I'm going with the assumption that FBI agents have to be mentally, physically and socially well rounded. Just a bit of a cut above the rest. I have the nWoD hunter book but I haven't really delved too much into it. Can characters go from normals to hunters or is it recommended that they just start off as low level hunters to begin with?

>>40501225You can go from normal to hunter, sure. The only real thing you need to be a hunter is to dedicate at least some part of your life to protecting normal people from the supernatural, however you decide to do that. Hunters get access to some teamwork maneuvers to make up for being individually weaker than what they're dealing with and gradually alter the Morality system to make killing hostile supers less mentally shattering. You can definitely fall into becoming a hunter after a game starts, and many mortal games do.

If you want 1e xp, then push it a little closer to 10. The pricing in original nWoD on stuff is bananas because it's exponential rather than flat like 2e presents it.

You might want to look for the Slasher supplement for nWoD (which is a standalone book but also has a lot for Hunter). It introduces VASCU, which are, essentially, the FBI with some psychics who specialise in serial killers. Millennium and the X-files were explicit references, so it might have at least something that you want. If nothing else, you could easily adapt the Slashers from the book into various hideous ubermutants.

What I would suggest is that you start it off reasonably close to the real world. Maybe to emphasise the FBI angle you should run a one-off introduction with an entirely mundane antagonist that's linked to the supernatural case - maybe a whistleblower was about to come forward and was killed for it, so your agents investigate and track down the killer. Perhaps the hitman was delayed by a snowstorm stopping air travel or there's a road closed, or he has several tasks to complete in addition to the kill, giving the agents time to catch up. That case session leads into the next one, and gives the newbie time to find their feet with the rules and their character. Maybe have the experienced player act as their in-character mentor?

Starting from a mundane (but exciting! Mustn't be boring!) gives a baseline to compare the weirdness of the main story to. OK, that guy turned into a tentacle monster. Emphasising that this is NOT part of the usual day job should make it more frightening.

Escalation: Start small with the odd stuff, work your way up to grand guignol. Think of Jaws. You'll only get to reveal the monster for the first time once, so make its entrance memorable and built up to.

Don't over explain things. A giant primeval fleshblob is probably above the paygrade of the PC agents. The Unknown is frightening. Your agents PROBABLY shouldn't believe vampires exist except maybe in a "I've seen some weird shit I can't explain" way - ooc yes they might know, but in game probably not, and certainly not about the esoteric bits of vampire society.

>>40503971Exactly! You could build an entertaining game just around the FBI thing, and the nice part is that the supernatural stuff adds a contrast to it. You can even go back to doing FBI stuff afterwards, although possibly with more openly supernatural cases. It might also train the newbie not to go full murderhobo - he's a professional, damn it, even when the world makes no sense.

You could even have office politics at the FBI - rivalry with the other alphabet agencies and local police, the pcs not getting much credit for the supernatural gig in part because its sworn to secrecy and in part because I'd bet money that there's going to be a lot of fire, devastation and bad press afterwards. You could have them shift over the VASCU or Task Force VALKRIE full time if the players want to go that way - their file clearly got flagged after the event and a recruiter pulled some strings.

To expand on the office politics thing, I was actually planning on having the new player's character be relatively new to the agency and paired up with the grognard's character as a punishment for some sort of protocol breach or faux pas. I'm 100% positive he's gonna make a paranoid Dale Gribble/Fox Molder character, so that'll work well. Like, poor newbie's teamed up with the office crackpot who's never quite fucked up enough to get fired, and then his whackadoo shit starts making too much sense. And then tentacles.

>>40504584I'm glad its helpful! That sounds like a winner of an idea, so long as Dale Mulder doesn't go too far - I mean, they won't tolerate too much of a screwball. Unless that's part of the point - newbie has been tasked with observing and digging up dirt to get the guy retired on a crackpot pension (or even dismissed without pay!). Crazypants might think its because the Boss is secretly in league with Dark Forces. He isn't, he just thinks the PC guy is an asshole wasting Company resources and is losing his marbles.

I'm trying to think of mundane/supernatural crimes for the FBI to investigate now. The only one I can think of right now would be something like a drug ring - aside from all the crime that goes with that people at various stage, various people in the chain are not all they seem. Perhaps its vampires, like it usually is. Maybe its Spring Court and Winter Court Changelings looking to flood a city with uppers so they could harvest all the euphoria and the despair of the lows when the users crash. Could literally just be that a mid level drug dealer awakened/turned to werewolf/got shot up and came back as a Geist/did weird shit and is making a move. In this scenario, you'd start at the bottom of the chain or with people in the system already and investigate up, uncovering more weird things as time goes on.

>>40504733>Unless that's part of the point - newbie has been tasked with observing and digging up dirt to get the guy retired on a crackpot pension (or even dismissed without pay!)

Shut up and kiss me.

>Drug ring

I think that'd be more DEA, although I could just have them work for the DEA. This could actually work really well, because I gotta imagine that the FBI or CIA is all the time taking cases away from them as soon as there is a hint of the drugs being used to fund larger criminal/terrorist enterprises as opposed to just being sold for the sake of being rich.

Sorry, I'm not actually Merican and get the agencies mixed up sometimes.

Them being DEA could give them an incentive to go after the weird shit with less backup than they need and not call for help too - its our case, man! We can't let these jackals take our case! Our stats are in the toilet since they took that coke thing in Florida!

>>40504733Train robbery. When cargo containers show up empty, they investigate fast and set up ambushes at all that train's stops. What the missing cargo is, is an opportunity for red herrings or actual clues. Maybe they're tossing half beefs into Mantarok's pit.

>>40505121>Them being DEA could give them an incentive to go after the weird shit with less backup than they need and not call for help too - its our case, man! We can't let these jackals take our case! Our stats are in the toilet since they took that coke thing in Florida!

My thoughts, exactly. I think DEA is the way to go as it's by FAR the smaller and less politically powerful agency. In fact, I've heard people making arguments that they and ATF (Alcohol tobacco and Firearms) should just be rolled into the FBI.

The PCs being DEA means that, even as government agents, they're the underdogs.

If this takes off, don't forget to throw mundane shit back in too, every once in a while the asshole is just a human like the attempt to frame Skinner for killing an escort, or the Big Blue killings *maaaaybe* just being a surprisingly-large crocodile.

You'll have to judge what works best for you and your players, I've just seen some folks rush up to the ceiling too quickly before.

>>40499635I'm going to paste the checklist of how to write a mystery (he called it a riddle) plot by Ronald B. Tobias. Though it's not meant for a roleplaying game, the general ideas might be useful:

>"The mystery story is really two stories in one: the story of what happened and the story of what appeared to happen." (Mary Roberts Rinehart)>The core of your riddle should be cleverness: hiding thatwhich is in plain sight.>The tension of your riddle should come from the conflictbetween what happens as opposed to what seems to have hap-pened.>The answer to your riddle should always be in plain viewwithout being obvious.>The first dramatic phase should consist of the generalitiesof the riddle (persons, places, events).>The second dramatic phase should consist of the specifics ofthe riddle (how persons, places and events relate to each other indetail).>The third dramatic phase should consist of the riddle's solu-tion, explaining the motives of the antagonist(s) and the real se-quence of events (as opposed to what seemed to have happened).>Choose between an open-ended and a close-ended structure.(Open-ended riddles have no clear answer; close-ended ones do.)

>>40499958If you want to go for an X-Files feel, I'd recommend against planning out too much from the beginning. Concentrate on the individual sessions, go for "monster/mystery of the week" and hint at connections between the cases whenever it seems appropriate. Having meta-elements that carry over from session to session (red herring or not) will make the players less open to other interpretations of the events and lessen the mystery effect.

"Could it have been the Jersey Devil?""Nah, probably vampires. Maybe a vampire shapeshifter. Or a creature made by vampires. Or [vampire shit]"

There's a group from hunter called the Cheiron Group. They're a massive bio-medical corporation that's implied to have deeply weird "things" going on at the top, and they hunt monsters to research them and break them down into usable products. Some of their hunters are upgraded using stolen monster parts, but its said that these are basically prototypes or failed product lines - OK, a werewolf tumour that gives you regeneration is all well and good, but it would have been much more profitable if we could market it as a pill and not have it drive people into frenzy. A bit like Umbrella Corp, but with less focus on Zombies for Everyone! and more final quarter financial concerns.

It might be tempting to have Cheiron as the guys responsible for your horrible vaccine - it would fit the unethical supernatural medical research angle. However, I suggest you have the company responsible be a corporate rival of Cheiron - that way you can introduce a team of Cheiron Hunters who are also investigating the problem under the guise of, I don't know, a business merger or a patent infringement case. Lawyer, business guy from head office leader, security detail and lets say local rep. They might well be subtly augmented, but they will do their best not to show that off in front of witnesses. This way you give your players some allies on the ground with similar goals but their own agenda who can help them in a pinch, a way to give information that's not base logs or something, and some "normal" people that the PCs have a reason to try and keep safe when things go mad, if only so they can get witness statements after the fact.

When its all over they could be recurring allies/antagonists based on whether the DEAgents are accidentally helping or hindering their corporate assets. You could even have your PCs be given business cards at the end with a note to say "if you're ever looking to get into the private sector, look me up! We could use guys like you. Patrick x.".

>>40511921This is astoundingly helpful, especially the "how to write a mystery" bit, thank you so much. And i wasn't really going for a cryptid angle, but it COULD be really really fun. I've got a real soft spot for Mothman...

>>40512308Cherion Group hunters could be great allies from the sounds of it. Nobody at the DEA believes what's going on (or is maybe even IN on it) but these guys know how the world really works.

>>40517432I think the important point about Cheiron is that they should be sometimes friends and sometimes enemies, but always have their own agenda. With your plot in the OP the DEA guys objectives are investigate and shut it down, the Cheiron team could be

#1: Work out if this is a case of corporate espionage ("hey! That's our abomination!")#2: Get back to HQ and give a report. Later send in either lawyers or a fully equipped "Field Projects Division" team.

When things go tits up, the plan changes to

#3: Get whatever they can back to base without arousing suspicion.#4: Destroy all the other evidence - no links to Cheiron if its is their work, and if it isn't, well, at least it puts a dent in their rival's bottom line.

They can be great guys on a purely human level, but they still work for the company.

>>40518513All these upgrades can be their own thing because at least in 1e of nWoD not every splat was assumed to exist in your chronicles, but you could also read them as coming from the other major lines. The Banality Worm is clearly some form of Abyssal creature from Mage, for example.

The attention whores. They will ask a question, but will only accept their own answer.

And the proper anons of /tg/. They listen to advice unless they've heard it a million times before, and they try to be helpful - sometimes in a snappy tone, but never with malice.

Anyway DG would work very well. And BRP is much more straightforward than WoD. Why you would want to carry legacy clutter like blood points and drawbacks just so you don't have to read 50 pages of rules is beyond me, but it takes all kinds.

>>40522617Then there's the fourth kind, the people who have no idea what they're talking about. Straight BB WoD is about as simple as systems come. Bloodpoints are part of the Vampire subsystem and Disadvantages are extremely simple.

Are you one of the people who got a headache trying to read the grapple rules in D&D?